Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes

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From The Young Astronomer's Poem

I.

AMBITION

    Another clouded night; the stars are hid,
    The orb that waits my search is hid with them.
    Patience! Why grudge an hour, a month, a year,
    To plant my ladder and to gain the round
    That leads my footsteps to the heaven of fame,
    Where waits the wreath my sleepless midnights won?
    Not the stained laurel such as heroes wear
    That withers when some stronger conqueror's heel
    Treads down their shrivelling trophies in the dust;
    But the fair garland whose undying green
    Not time can change, nor wrath of gods or men!

    With quickened heart-beats I shall hear tongues
    That speak my praise; but better far the sense
    That in the unshaped ages, buried deep
    In the dark mines of unaccomplished time
    Yet to be stamped with morning's royal die
    And coined in golden days, - in those dim years
    I shall be reckoned with the undying dead,
    My name emblazoned on the fiery arch,
    Unfading till the stars themselves shall fade.
    Then, as they call the roll of shining worlds,
    Sages of race unborn in accents new
    Shall count me with the Olympian ones of old,
    Whose glories kindle through the midnight sky
    Here glows the God of Battles; this recalls
    The Lord of Ocean, and yon far-off sphere
    The Sire of Him who gave his ancient name
    To the dim planet with the wondrous rings;
    Here flames the Queen of Beauty's silver lamp,
    And there the moon-girt orb of mighty Jove;
    But this, unseen through all earth's ions past,
    A youth who watched beneath the western star
    Sought in the darkness, found, and shewed to men;
    Linked with his name thenceforth and evermore
    So shall that name be syllabled anew
    In all the tongues of all the tribes of men:
    I that have been through immemorial years
    Dust in the dust of my forgotten time
    Shall live in accents shaped of blood-warm breath,
    Yea, rise in mortal semblance, newly born
    In shining stone, in undecaying bronze,
    And stand on high, and look serenely down
    On the new race that calls the earth its own.

    Is this a cloud, that, blown athwart my soul,
    Wears a false seeming of the pearly stain
    Where worlds beyond the world their mingling rays
    Blend in soft white, - a cloud that, born of earth,
    Would cheat the soul that looks for light from heaven?
    Must every coral-insect leave his sign
    On each poor grain he lent to build the reef,
    As Babel's builders stamped their sunburnt clay,
    Or deem his patient service all in vain?
    What if another sit beneath the shade
    Of the broad elm I planted by the way, - 
    What if another heed the beacon light
    I set upon the rock that wrecked my keel, - 
    Have I not done my task and served my kind?
    Nay, rather act thy part, unnamed, unknown,
    And let Fame blow her trumpet through the world
    With noisy wind to swell a fool's renown,
    Joined with some truth he stumbled blindly o'er,
    Or coupled with some single shining deed
    That in the great account of all his days
    Will stand alone upon the bankrupt sheet
    His pitying angel shows the clerk of Heaven.
    The noblest service comes from nameless hands,
    And the best servant does his work unseen.
    Who found the seeds of fire and made them shoot,
    Fed by his breath, in buds and flowers of flame?
    Who forged in roaring flames the ponderous stone,
    And shaped the moulded metal to his need?
    Who gave the dragging car its rolling wheel,
    And tamed the steed that whirls its circling round?
    All these have left their work and not their names, - 
    Why should I murmur at a fate like theirs?
    This is the heavenly light; the pearly stain
    Was but a wind-cloud drifting o'er the stars!



II.

REGRETS

    Brief glimpses of the bright celestial spheres,
    False lights, false shadows, vague, uncertain gleams,
    Pale vaporous mists, wan streaks of lurid flame,
    The climbing of the upward-sailing cloud,
    The sinking of the downward-falling star, - 
    All these are pictures of the changing moods
    Borne through the midnight stillness of my soul.

    Here am I, bound upon this pillared rock,
    Prey to the vulture of a vast desire
    That feeds upon my life. I burst my bands
    And steal a moment's freedom from the beak,
    The clinging talons and the shadowing plumes;
    Then comes the false enchantress, with her song;

    "Thou wouldst not lay thy forehead in the dust
    Like the base herd that feeds and breeds and dies
    Lo, the fair garlands that I weave for thee,
    Unchanging as the belt Orion wears,
    Bright as the jewels of the seven-starred Crown,
    The spangled stream of Berenice's hair!"
    And so she twines the fetters with the flowers
    Around my yielding limbs, and the fierce bird
    Stoops to his quarry, - then to feed his rage
    Of ravening hunger I must drain my blood
    And let the dew-drenched, poison-breeding night
    Steal all the freshness from my fading cheek,
    And leave its shadows round my caverned eyes.
    All for a line in some unheeded scroll;
    All for a stone that tells to gaping clowns,
    "Here lies a restless wretch beneath a clod
    Where squats the jealous nightmare men call
    Fame!"

    I marvel not at him who scorns his kind
    And thinks not sadly of the time foretold
    When the old hulk we tread shall be a wreck,
    A slag, a cinder drifting through the sky
    Without its crew of fools! We live too long,
    And even so are not content to die,
    But load the mould that covers up our bones
    With stones that stand like beggars by the road
    And show death's grievous wound and ask for tears;
    Write our great books to teach men who we are,
    Sing our fine songs that tell in artful phrase
    The secrets of our lives, and plead and pray
    For alms of memory with the after time,
    Those few swift seasons while the earth shall wear
    Its leafy summers, ere its core grows cold
    And the moist life of all that breathes shall die;
    Or as the new-born seer, perchance more wise,
    Would have us deem, before its growing mass,
    Pelted with star-dust, stoned with meteor-balls,
    Heats like a hammered anvil, till at last
    Man and his works and all that stirred itself
    Of its own motion, in the fiery glow
    Turns to a flaming vapor, and our orb
    Shines a new sun for earths that shall be born.

    I am as old as Egypt to myself,
    Brother to them that squared the pyramids
    By the same stars I watch. I read the page
    Where every letter is a glittering world,
    With them who looked from Shinar's clay-built towers,
    Ere yet the wanderer of the Midland sea
    Had missed the fallen sister of the seven.
    I dwell in spaces vague, remote, unknown,
    Save to the silent few, who, leaving earth,
    Quit all communion with their living time.
    I lose myself in that ethereal void,
    Till I have tired my wings and long to fill
    My breast with denser air, to stand, to walk
    With eyes not raised above my fellow-men.
    Sick of my unwalled, solitary realm,
    I ask to change the myriad lifeless worlds
    I visit as mine own for one poor patch
    Of this dull spheroid and a little breath
    To shape in word or deed to serve my kind.
    Was ever giant's dungeon dug so deep,
    Was ever tyrant's fetter forged so strong,
    Was e'er such deadly poison in the draught
    The false wife mingles for the trusting fool,
    As he whose willing victim is himself,
    Digs, forges, mingles, for his captive soul?



III.

SYMPATHIES

    The snows that glittered on the disk of Mars
    Have melted, and the planet's fiery orb
    Rolls in the crimson summer of its year;
    But what to me the summer or the snow
    Of worlds that throb with life in forms unknown,
    If life indeed be theirs; I heed not these.
    My heart is simply human; all my care
    For them whose dust is fashioned like mine own;
    These ache with cold and hunger, live in pain,
    And shake with fear of worlds more full of woe;
    There may be others worthier of my love,
    But such I know not save through these I know.

    There are two veils of language, hid beneath
    Whose sheltering folds, we dare to be ourselves;
    And not that other self which nods and smiles
    And babbles in our name; the one is Prayer,
    Lending its licensed freedom to the tongue
    That tells our sorrows and our sins to Heaven;
    The other, Verse, that throws its spangled web
    Around our naked speech and makes it bold.
    I, whose best prayer is silence; sitting dumb
    In the great temple where I nightly serve
    Him who is throned in light, have dared to claim
    The poet's franchise, though I may not hope
    To wear his garland; hear me while I tell
    My story in such form as poets use,
    But breathed in fitful whispers, as the wind
    Sighs and then slumbers, wakes and sighs again.

    Thou Vision, floating in the breathless air
    Between me and the fairest of the stars,
    I tell my lonely thoughts as unto thee.
    Look not for marvels of the scholar's pen
    In my rude measure; I can only show
    A slender-margined, unillumined page,
    And trust its meaning to the flattering eye
    That reads it in the gracious light of love.
    Ah, wouldst thou clothe thyself in breathing shape
    And nestle at my side, my voice should lend
    Whate'er my verse may lack of tender rhythm
    To make thee listen.

    I have stood entranced
    When, with her fingers wandering o'er the keys,
    The white enchantress with the golden hair
    Breathed all her soul through some unvalued rhyme;
    Some flower of song that long had lost its bloom;
    Lo! its dead summer kindled as she sang!
    The sweet contralto, like the ringdove's coo,
    Thrilled it with brooding, fond, caressing tones,
    And the pale minstrel's passion lived again,
    Tearful and trembling as a dewy rose
    The wind has shaken till it fills the air
    With light and fragrance. Such the wondrous charm
    A song can borrow when the bosom throbs
    That lends it breath.

    So from the poet's lips
    His verse sounds doubly sweet, for none like him
    Feels every cadence of its wave-like flow;
    He lives the passion over, while he reads,
    That shook him as he sang his lofty strain,
    And pours his life through each resounding line,
    As ocean, when the stormy winds are hushed,
    Still rolls and thunders through his billowy caves.


IV.

MASTER AND SCHOLAR

    Let me retrace the record of the years
    That made me what I am. A man most wise,
    But overworn with toil and bent with age,
    Sought me to be his scholar,-me, run wild
    From books and teachers,-kindled in my soul
    The love of knowledge; led me to his tower,
    Showed me the wonders of the midnight realm
    His hollow sceptre ruled, or seemed to rule,
    Taught me the mighty secrets of the spheres,
    Trained me to find the glimmering specks of light
    Beyond the unaided sense, and on my chart
    To string them one by one, in order due,
    As on a rosary a saint his beads.
    I was his only scholar; I became
    The echo to his thought; whate'er he knew
    Was mine for asking; so from year to year
    W e wrought together, till there came a time
    When I, the learner, was the master half
    Of the twinned being in the dome-crowned tower.

    Minds roll in paths like planets; they revolve,
    This in a larger, that a narrower ring,
    But round they come at last to that same phase,
    That selfsame light and shade they showed before.
    I learned his annual and his monthly tale,
    His weekly axiom and his daily phrase,
    I felt them coming in the laden air,
    And watched them laboring up to vocal breath,
    Even as the first-born at his father's board
    Knows ere he speaks the too familiar jest
    Is on its way, by some mysterious sign
    Forewarned, the click before the striking bell.

    He shrivelled as I spread my growing leaves,
    Till trust and reverence changed to pitying care;
    He lived for me in what he once had been,
    But I for him, a shadow, a defence,
    The guardian of his fame, his guide, his staff,
    Leaned on so long he fell if left alone.
    I was his eye, his ear, his cunning hand,
    Love was my spur and longing after fame,
    But his the goading thorn of sleepless age
    That sees its shortening span, its lengthening shades,
    That clutches what it may with eager grasp,
    And drops at last with empty, outstretched hands.
    All this he dreamed not. He would sit him down
    Thinking to work his problems as of old,
    And find the star he thought so plain a blur,
    The columned figures labyrinthine wilds
    Without my comment, blind and senseless scrawls
    That vexed him with their riddles; he would strive
    And struggle for a while, and then his eye
    Would lose its light, and over all his mind
    The cold gray mist would settle; and erelong
    The darkness fell, and I was left alone.


V.

ALONE

    Alone! no climber of an Alpine cliff,
    No Arctic venturer on the waveless sea,
    Feels the dread stillness round him as it chills
    The heart of him who leaves the slumbering earth
    To watch the silent worlds that crowd the sky.
    Alone! And as the shepherd leaves his flock
    To feed upon the hillside, he meanwhile
    Finds converse in the warblings of the pipe
    Himself has fashioned for his vacant hour,
    So have I grown companion to myself,
    And to the wandering spirits of the air
    That smile and whisper round us in our dreams.
    Thus have I learned to search if I may know
    The whence and why of all beneath the stars
    And all beyond them, and to weigh my life
    As in a balance, - poising good and ill
    Against each other, - asking of the Power
    That flung me forth among the whirling worlds,
    If I am heir to any inborn right,
    Or only as an atom of the dust
    That every wind may blow where'er it will.


VI.

QUESTIONING

    I am not humble; I was shown my place,
    Clad in such robes as Nature had at hand;
    Took what she gave, not chose; I know no shame,
    No fear for being simply what I am.
    I am not proud, I hold my every breath
    At Nature's mercy. I am as a babe
    Borne in a giant's arms, he knows not where;
    Each several heart-beat, counted like the coin
    A miser reckons, is a special gift
    As from an unseen hand; if that withhold
    Its bounty for a moment, I am left
    A clod upon the earth to which I fall.

    Something I find in me that well might claim
    The love of beings in a sphere above
    This doubtful twilight world of right and wrong;
    Something that shows me of the self-same clay
    That creeps or swims or flies in humblest form.
    Had I been asked, before I left my bed
    Of shapeless dust, what clothing I would wear,
    I would have said, More angel and less worm;
    But for their sake who are even such as I,
    Of the same mingled blood, I would not choose
    To hate that meaner portion of myself
    Which makes me brother to the least of men.

    I dare not be a coward with my lips
    Who dare to question all things in my soul;
    Some men may find their wisdom on their knees,
    Some prone and grovelling in the dust like slaves;
    Let the meek glowworm glisten in the dew;
    I ask to lift my taper to the sky
    As they who hold their lamps above their heads,
    Trusting the larger currents up aloft,
    Rather than crossing eddies round their breast,
    Threatening with every puff the flickering blaze.

    My life shall be a challenge, not a truce!
    This is my homage to the mightier powers,
    To ask my boldest question, undismayed
    By muttered threats that some hysteric sense
    Of wrong or insult will convulse the throne
    Where wisdom reigns supreme; and if I err,
    They all must err who have to feel their way
    As bats that fly at noon; for what are we
    But creatures of the night, dragged forth by day,
    Who needs must stumble, and with stammering steps
    Spell out their paths in syllables of pain?

    Thou wilt not hold in scorn the child who dares
    Look up to Thee, the Father, - dares to ask
    More than thy wisdom answers. From thy hand
    The worlds were cast; yet every leaflet claims
    From that same hand its little shining sphere
    Of star-lit dew; thine image, the great sun,
    Girt with his mantle of tempestuous flame,
    Glares in mid-heaven; but to his noon-tide blaze
    The slender violet lifts its lidless eye,
    And from his splendor steals its fairest hue,
    Its sweetest perfume from his scorching fire.


VII.

WORSHIP

    From my lone turret as I look around
    O'er the green meadows to the ring of blue,
    From slope, from summit, and from half-hid vale
    The sky is stabbed with dagger-pointed spires,
    Their gilded symbols whirling in the wind,
    Their brazen tongues proclaiming to the world,
    "Here truth is sold, the only genuine ware;
    See that it has our trade-mark! You will buy
    Poison instead of food across the way,
    The lies of    -    - -" this or that, each several name
    The standard's blazon and the battle-cry
    Of some true-gospel faction, and again
    The token of the Beast to all beside.
    And grouped round each I see a huddling crowd
    Alike in all things save the words they use;
    In love, in longing, hate and fear the same.

    Whom do we trust and serve? We speak of one
    And bow to many; Athens still would find
    The shrines of all she worshipped safe within
    Our tall barbarian temples, and the thrones
    That crowned Olympus mighty as of old.
    The god of music rules the Sabbath choir;
    The lyric muse must leave the sacred nine
    To help us please the dilettante's ear;
    Plutus limps homeward with us, as we leave
    The portals of the temple where we knelt
    And listened while the god of eloquence
    (Hermes of ancient days, but now disguised
    In sable vestments) with that other god
    Somnus, the son of Erebus and Nox,
    Fights in unequal contest for our souls;
    The dreadful sovereign of the under world
    Still shakes his sceptre at us, and we hear
    The baying of the triple-throated hound;
    Eros is young as ever, and as fair
    The lovely Goddess born of ocean's foam.

    These be thy gods, O Israel! Who is he,
    The one ye name and tell us that ye serve,
    Whom ye would call me from my lonely tower
    To worship with the many-headed throng?
    Is it the God that walked in Eden's grove
    In the cool hour to seek our guilty sire?
    The God who dealt with Abraham as the sons
    Of that old patriarch deal with other men?
    The jealous God of Moses, one who feels
    An image as an insult, and is wroth
    With him who made it and his child unborn?
    The God who plagued his people for the sin
    Of their adulterous king, beloved of him, - 
    The same who offers to a chosen few
    The right to praise him in eternal song
    While a vast shrieking world of endless woe
    Blends its dread chorus with their rapturous hymn?
    Is this the God ye mean, or is it he
    Who heeds the sparrow's fall, whose loving heart
    Is as the pitying father's to his child,
    Whose lesson to his children is "Forgive,"
    Whose plea for all, "They know not what they do"?


VIII.

MANHOOD

    I claim the right of knowing whom I serve,
    Else is my service idle; He that asks
    My homage asks it from a reasoning soul.
    To crawl is not to worship; we have learned
    A drill of eyelids, bended neck and knee,
    Hanging our prayers on hinges, till we ape
    The flexures of the many-jointed worm.
    Asia has taught her Allahs and salaams
    To the world's children,-we have grown to men!
    We who have rolled the sphere beneath our feet
    To find a virgin forest, as we lay
    The beams of our rude temple, first of all
    Must frame its doorway high enough for man
    To pass unstooping; knowing as we do
    That He who shaped us last of living forms
    Has long enough been served by creeping things,
    Reptiles that left their footprints in the sand
    Of old sea-margins that have turned to stone,
    And men who learned their ritual; we demand
    To know Him first, then trust Him and then love
    When we have found Him worthy of our love,
    Tried by our own poor hearts and not before;
    He must be truer than the truest friend,
    He must be tenderer than a woman's love,
    A father better than the best of sires;
    Kinder than she who bore us, though we sin
    Oftener than did the brother we are told
    We - poor ill-tempered mortals - must forgive,
    Though seven times sinning threescore times and
    ten.

    This is the new world's gospel: Be ye men!
    Try well the legends of the children's time;
    Ye are the chosen people, God has led
    Your steps across the desert of the deep
    As now across the desert of the shore;
    Mountains are cleft before you as the sea
    Before the wandering tribe of Israel's sons;
    Still onward rolls the thunderous caravan,
    Its coming printed on the western sky,
    A cloud by day, by night a pillared flame;
    Your prophets are a hundred unto one
    Of them of old who cried, "Thus saith the Lord;"
    They told of cities that should fall in heaps,
    But yours of mightier cities that shall rise
    Where yet the lonely fishers spread their nets,
    Where hides the fox and hoots the midnight owl;
    The tree of knowledge in your garden grows
    Not single, but at every humble door;
    Its branches lend you their immortal food,
    That fills you with the sense of what ye are,
    No servants of an altar hewed and carved
    From senseless stone by craft of human hands,
    Rabbi, or dervish, brahmin, bishop, bonze,
    But masters of the charm with which they work
    To keep your hands from that forbidden tree!

    Ye that have tasted that divinest fruit,
    Look on this world of yours with opened eyes!
    Y e are as gods! Nay, makers of your gods, - 
    Each day ye break an image in your shrine
    And plant a fairer image where it stood
    Where is the Moloch of your fathers' creed,
    Whose fires of torment burned for span - long babes?
    Fit object for a tender mother's love!
    Why not? It was a bargain duly made
    For these same infants through the surety's act
    Intrusted with their all for earth and heaven,
    By Him who chose their guardian, knowing well
    His fitness for the task, - this, even this,
    Was the true doctrine only yesterday
    As thoughts are reckoned, - and to - day you hear
    In words that sound as if from human tongues
    Those monstrous, uncouth horrors of the past
    That blot the blue of heaven and shame the earth
    As would the saurians of the age of slime,
    Awaking from their stony sepulchres
    And wallowing hateful in the eye of day!


IX.

RIGHTS

    What am I but the creature Thou hast made?
    What have I save the blessings Thou hast lent?
    What hope I but thy mercy and thy love?
    Who but myself shall cloud my soul with fear?
    Whose hand protect me from myself but thine?
    I claim the rights of weakness, I, the babe,
    Call on my sire to shield me from the ills
    That still beset my path, not trying me
    With snares beyond my wisdom or my strength,
    He knowing I shall use them to my harm,
    And find a tenfold misery in the sense
    That in my childlike folly I have sprung
    The trap upon myself as vermin use,
    Drawn by the cunning bait to certain doom.
    Who wrought the wondrous charm that leads us on
    To sweet perdition, but the selfsame power
    That set the fearful engine to destroy
    His wretched offspring (as the Rabbis tell),
    And hid its yawning jaws and treacherous springs
    In such a show of innocent sweet flowers
    It lured the sinless angels and they fell?
    Ah! He who prayed the prayer of all mankind
    Summed in those few brief words the mightiest plea
    For erring souls before the courts of heaven, - 
    Save us from being tempted, - lest we fall!

    If we are only as the potter's clay
    Made to be fashioned as the artist wills,
    And broken into shards if we offend
    The eye of Him who made us, it is well;
    Such love as the insensate lump of clay
    That spins upon the swift-revolving wheel
    Bears to the hand that shapes its growing form, - 
    Such love, no more, will be our hearts' return
    To the great Master-workman for his care, - 
    Or would be, save that this, our breathing clay,
    Is intertwined with fine innumerous threads
    That make it conscious in its framer's hand;
    And this He must remember who has filled
    These vessels with the deadly draught of life, - 
    Life, that means death to all it claims. Our love
    Must kindle in the ray that streams from heaven,
    A faint reflection of the light divine;
    The sun must warm the earth before the rose
    Can show her inmost heart-leaves to the sun.

    He yields some fraction of the Maker's right
    Who gives the quivering nerve its sense of pain;
    Is there not something in the pleading eye
    Of the poor brute that suffers, which arraigns
    The law that bids it suffer? Has it not
    A claim for some remembrance in the book
    That fills its pages with the idle words
    Spoken of men? Or is it only clay,
    Bleeding and aching in the potter's hand,
    Yet all his own to treat it as He will
    And when He will to cast it at his feet,
    Shattered, dishonored, lost forevermore?
    My dog loves me, but could he look beyond
    His earthly master, would his love extend
    To Him who - Hush! I will not doubt that He
    Is better than our fears, and will not wrong
    The least, the meanest of created things!

    He would not trust me with the smallest orb
    That circles through the sky; He would not give
    A meteor to my guidance; would not leave
    The coloring of a cloudlet to my hand;
    He locks my beating heart beneath its bars
    And keeps the key himself; He measures out
    The draughts of vital breath that warm my blood,
    Winds up the springs of instinct which uncoil,
    Each in its season; ties me to my home,
    My race, my time, my nation, and my creed
    So closely that if I but slip my wrist
    Out of the band that cuts it to the bone,
    Men say, "He hath a devil;" He has lent
    All that I hold in trust, as unto one
    By reason of his weakness and his years
    Not fit to hold the smallest shred in fee
    Of those most common things he calls his own, - 
    And yet - my Rabbi tells me - He has left
    The care of that to which a million worlds
    Filled with unconscious life were less than naught,
    Has left that mighty universe, the Soul,
    To the weak guidance of our baby hands,
    Let the foul fiends have access at their will,
    Taking the shape of angels, to our hearts, - 
    Our hearts already poisoned through and through
    With the fierce virus of ancestral sin;
    Turned us adrift with our immortal charge,
    To wreck ourselves in gulfs of endless woe.

    If what my Rabbi tells me is the truth
    Why did the choir of angels sing for joy?
    Heaven must be compassed in a narrow space,
    And offer more than room enough for all
    That pass its portals; but the under-world,
    The godless realm, the place where demons forge
    Their fiery darts and adamantine chains,
    Must swarm with ghosts that for a little while
    Had worn the garb of flesh, and being heirs
    Of all the dulness of their stolid sires,
    And all the erring instincts of their tribe,
    Nature's own teaching, rudiments of "sin,"
    Fell headlong in the snare that could not fail
    To trap the wretched creatures shaped of clay
    And cursed with sense enough to lose their souls!

    Brother, thy heart is troubled at my word;
    Sister, I see the cloud is on thy brow.
    He will not blame me, He who sends not peace,
    But sends a sword, and bids us strike amain
    At Error's gilded crest, where in the van
    Of earth's great army, mingling with the best
    And bravest of its leaders, shouting loud
    The battle-cries that yesterday have led
    The host of Truth to victory, but to-day
    Are watchwords of the laggard and the slave,
    He leads his dazzled cohorts. God has made
    This world a strife of atoms and of spheres;
    With every breath I sigh myself away
    And take my tribute from the wandering wind
    To fan the flame of life's consuming fire;
    So, while my thought has life, it needs must burn,
    And, burning, set the stubble-fields ablaze,
    Where all the harvest long ago was reaped
    And safely garnered in the ancient barns.
    But still the gleaners, groping for their food,
    Go blindly feeling through the close-shorn straw,
    While the young reapers flash, their glittering steel
    Where later suns have ripened nobler grain!


X.

TRUTHS

    The time is racked with birth-pangs; every hour
    Brings forth some gasping truth, and truth newborn
    Looks a misshapen and untimely growth,
    The terror of the household and its shame,
    A monster coiling in its nurse's lap
    That some would strangle, some would only starve;
    But still it breathes, and passed from hand to hand,
    And suckled at a hundred half-clad breasts,
    Comes slowly to its stature and its form,
    Calms the rough ridges of its dragon-scales,
    Changes to shining locks its snaky hair,
    And moves transfigured into angel guise,
    Welcomed by all that cursed its hour of birth,
    And folded in the same encircling arms
    That cast it like a serpent from their hold!

    If thou wouldst live in honor, die in peace,
    Have the fine words the marble-workers learn
    To carve so well, upon thy funeral-stone,
    And earn a fair obituary, dressed
    In all the many-colored robes of praise,
    Be deafer than the adder to the cry
    Of that same foundling truth, until it grows
    To seemly favor, and at length has won
    The smiles of hard-mouthed men and light-lipped dames;
    Then snatch it from its meagre nurse's breast,
    Fold it in silk and give it food from gold;
    So shalt thou share its glory when at last
    It drops its mortal vesture, and, revealed
    In all the splendor of its heavenly form,
    Spreads on the startled air its mighty wings!

    Alas! how much that seemed immortal truth
    That heroes fought for, martyrs died to save,
    Reveals its earth-born lineage, growing old
    And limping in its march, its wings unplumed,
    Its heavenly semblance faded like a dream!
    Here in this painted casket, just unsealed,
    Lies what was once a breathing shape like thine,
    Once loved as thou art loved; there beamed the eyes
    That looked on Memphis in its hour of pride,
    That saw the walls of hundred-gated Thebes,
    And all the mirrored glories of the Nile.
    See how they toiled that all-consuming time
    Might leave the frame immortal in its tomb;
    Filled it with fragrant balms and odorous gums
    That still diffuse their sweetness through the air,
    And wound and wound with patient fold on fold
    The flaxen bands thy hand has rudely torn!
    Perchance thou yet canst see the faded stain
    Of the sad mourner's tear.


XI.

IDOLS

    But what is this?
    The sacred beetle, bound upon the breast
    Of the blind heathen! Snatch the curious prize,
    Give it a place among thy treasured spoils,
    Fossil and relic, - corals, encrinites,
    The fly in amber and the fish in stone,
    The twisted circlet of Etruscan gold,
    Medal, intaglio, poniard, poison-ring, - 
    Place for the Memphian beetle with thine hoard!

    AM longer than thy creed has blest the world
    This toy, thus ravished from thy brother's breast,
    Was to the heart of Mizraim as divine,
    As holy, as the symbol that we lay
    On the still bosom of our white-robed dead,
    And raise above their dust that all may know
    Here sleeps an heir of glory. Loving friends,
    With tears of trembling faith and choking sobs,
    And prayers to those who judge of mortal deeds,
    Wrapped this poor image in the cerement's fold
    That Isis and Osiris, friends of man,
    Might know their own and claim the ransomed soul.

    An idol? Man was born to worship such!
    An idol is an image of his thought;
    Sometimes he carves it out of gleaming stone,
    And sometimes moulds it out of glittering gold,
    Or rounds it in a mighty frescoed dome,
    Or lifts it heavenward in a lofty spire,
    Or shapes it in a cunning frame of words,
    Or pays his priest to make it day by day;
    For sense must have its god as well as soul;
    A new-born Dian calls for silver shrines,
    And Egypt's holiest symbol is our own,
    The sign we worship as did they of old
    When Isis and Osiris ruled the world.

    Let us be true to our most subtle selves,
    We long to have our idols like the rest.
    Think! when the men of Israel had their God
    Encamped among them, talking with their chief,
    Leading them in the pillar of the cloud
    And watching o'er them in the shaft of fire,
    They still must have an image; still they longed
    For somewhat of substantial, solid form
    Whereon to hang their garlands, and to fix
    Their wandering thoughts and gain a stronger hold
    For their uncertain faith, not yet assured
    If those same meteors of the day and night
    Were not mere exhalations of the soil.
    Are we less earthly than the chosen race?
    Are we more neighbors of the living God
    Than they who gathered manna every morn,
    Reaping where none had sown, and heard the voice
    Of him who met the Highest in the mount,
    And brought them tables, graven with His hand?
    Yet these must have their idol, brought their gold,
    That star-browed Apis might be god again;
    Yea, from their ears the women brake the rings
    That lent such splendors to the gypsy brown
    Of sunburnt cheeks, - what more could woman do
    To show her pious zeal? They went astray,
    But nature led them as it leads us all.
    We too, who mock at Israel's golden calf
    And scoff at Egypt's sacred scarabee,
    Would have our amulets to clasp and kiss,
    And flood with rapturous tears, and bear with us
    To be our dear companions in the dust;
    Such magic works an image in our souls.

    Man is an embryo; see at twenty years
    His bones, the columns that uphold his frame
    Not yet cemented, shaft and capital,
    Mere fragments of the temple incomplete.
    At twoscore, threescore, is he then full grown?
    Nay, still a child, and as the little maids
    Dress and undress their puppets, so he tries
    To dress a lifeless creed, as if it lived,
    And change its raiment when the world cries shame!

    We smile to see our little ones at play
    So grave, so thoughtful, with maternal care
    Nursing the wisps of rags they call their babes; - 
    Does He not smile who sees us with the toys
    We call by sacred names, and idly feign
    To be what we have called them? He is still
    The Father of this helpless nursery-brood,
    Whose second childhood joins so close its first,
    That in the crowding, hurrying years between
    We scarce have trained our senses to their task
    Before the gathering mist has dimmed our eyes,
    And with our hollowed palm we help our ear,
    And trace with trembling hand our wrinkled names,
    And then begin to tell our stories o'er,
    And see - not hear - the whispering lips that say,
    "You know? Your father knew him. - This is he,
    Tottering and leaning on the hireling's arm," - 
    And so, at length, disrobed of all that clad
    The simple life we share with weed and worm,
    Go to our cradles, naked as we came.


XII.

LOVE

    What if a soul redeemed, a spirit that loved
    While yet on earth and was beloved in turn,
    And still remembered every look and tone
    Of that dear earthly sister who was left
    Among the unwise virgins at the gate, - 
    Itself admitted with the bridegroom's train, - 
    What if this spirit redeemed, amid the host
    Of chanting angels, in some transient lull
    Of the eternal anthem, heard the cry
    Of its lost darling, whom in evil hour
    Some wilder pulse of nature led astray
    And left an outcast in a world of fire,
    Condemned to be the sport of cruel fiends,
    Sleepless, unpitying, masters of the skill
    To wring the maddest ecstasies of pain
    From worn-out souls that only ask to die, - 
    Would it not long to leave the bliss of heaven, - 
    Bearing a little water in its hand
    To moisten those poor lips that plead in vain
    With Him we call our Father? Or is all
    So changed in such as taste celestial joy
    They hear unmoved the endless wail of woe;
    The daughter in the same dear tones that hushed
    Her cradle slumbers; she who once had held
    A babe upon her bosom from its voice
    Hoarse with its cry of anguish, yet the same?

    No! not in ages when the Dreadful Bird
    Stamped his huge footprints, and the Fearful Beast
    Strode with the flesh about those fossil bones
    We build to mimic life with pygmy hands, - 
    Not in those earliest days when men ran wild
    And gashed each other with their knives of stone,
    When their low foreheads bulged in ridgy brows
    And their flat hands were callous in the palm
    With walking in the fashion of their sires,
    Grope as they might to find a cruel god
    To work their will on such as human wrath
    Had wrought its worst to torture, and had left
    With rage unsated, white and stark and cold,
    Could hate have shaped a demon more malign
    Than him the dead men mummied in their creed
    And taught their trembling children to adore!

    Made in his image! Sweet and gracious souls
    Dear to my heart by nature's fondest names,
    Is not your memory still the precious mould
    That lends its form to Him who hears my prayer?
    Thus only I behold Him, like to them,
    Long-suffering, gentle, ever slow to wrath,
    If wrath it be that only wounds to heal,
    Ready to meet the wanderer ere he reach
    The door he seeks, forgetful of his sin,
    Longing to clasp him in a father's arms,
    And seal his pardon with a pitying tear!

    Four gospels tell their story to mankind,
    And none so full of soft, caressing words
    That bring the Maid of Bethlehem and her Babe
    Before our tear-dimmed eyes, as his who learned
    In the meek service of his gracious art
    The tones which, like the medicinal balms
    That calm the sufferer's anguish, soothe our souls.
    Oh that the loving woman, she who sat
    So long a listener at her Master's feet,
    Had left us Mary's Gospel, - all she heard
    Too sweet, too subtle for the ear of man!
    Mark how the tender-hearted mothers read
    The messages of love between the lines
    Of the same page that loads the bitter tongue
    Of him who deals in terror as his trade
    With threatening words of wrath that scorch like flame
    They tell of angels whispering round the bed
    Of the sweet infant smiling in its dream,
    Of lambs enfolded in the Shepherd's arms,
    Of Him who blessed the children; of the land
    Where crystal rivers feed unfading flowers,
    Of cities golden-paved with streets of pearl,
    Of the white robes the winged creatures wear,
    The crowns and harps from whose melodious strings
    One long, sweet anthem flows forevermore!
    We too had human mothers, even as Thou,
    Whom we have learned to worship as remote
    From mortal kindred, wast a cradled babe.
    The milk of woman filled our branching veins,
    She lulled us with her tender nursery-song,
    And folded round us her untiring arms,
    While the first unremembered twilight yeas
    Shaped us to conscious being; still we feel
    Her pulses in our own, - too faintly feel;
    Would that the heart of woman warmed our creeds!

    Not from the sad-eyed hermit's lonely cell,
    Not from the conclave where the holy men
    Glare on each other, as with angry eyes
    They battle for God's glory and their own,
    Till, sick of wordy strife, a show of hands
    Fixes the faith of ages yet unborn, - 
    Ah, not from these the listening soul can hear
    The Father's voice that speaks itself divine!
    Love must be still our Master; till we learn
    What he can teach us of a woman's heart,
    We know not His whose love embraces all.

---

Type of Poem: Reflective Poem

Date Written:

Date Published:

Language: English

Keywords: Public Domain

Source: Public Domain Collection

Publisher:

Rights/Permissions: Public Domain

Comments/Notes: From The Young Astronomer's Poem